Before applying for my Masters in Counselling Psychology, I had to take several undergraduate prerequisites in Psychology and related subjects. I remember how nervous I felt teaching my first undergraduate course, Freshman Composition, at the University of Florida in 1984, only a few years older than most of my students and younger than several of them. After a time, being a teacher and university level became second nature, and my teaching evolved through learning from colleagues, through developments in university teaching practices, through technology, and indeed through living in a particular social environment and making connections to it. What was it like being back on the other side of the fence, over thirty years after I finished my undergraduate degree?

I’ve five undergraduate courses over the last two years. Three were at the University of British Columbia, and two of these I took as short summer courses. I’ll mention them briefly. CNPS 362, Basic Interviewing Skills, aimed to begin to foster some of the empathic listening skills counsellors need. There was a lot of hands-on practical work, and it was taught by a practitioner who was skilled and thoughtful. I’ve nothing to compare it to. CNPS 365, Introduction to Theories of Counselling, was taught by a practitioner who had a much greater knowledge of practice than of theory! I enjoyed this course, and was engaged with it: I think it taught me something I’ve noticed in counselling studies that is rather different from my previous work in the humanities and social sciences. People may often have what seem to be rather un-thought-out and slightly crazy theoretical orientations, but may actually have very rich and fruitful modes of practising as counsellors. It’s something of a truism in counselling studies that all research shows that the theoretical orientation of the counsellor is much less important than her ability to establish a therapeutic alliance with the client.

The three other courses I took were all online, and it’s here that the differences with my own undergraduate education became apparent. Before I get going, let me say I don’t want to idealise my own undergraduate education at University College London from 1979 to 1982. There was little real curricular choice, staff had often no training in teaching and would often read out lectures in a dull monotone, and sexual harassment was normalized. Some 90% of our assessment was through examinations that took place at the end of the second and third years of the degree. Fifty per cent of UCL undergraduates at that time were from private schools, and for me, despite having attended a selective state school, fitting into class discussions was as much about achieving certain kinds of class competencies and behaviours as it was about engaging in genuine intellectual discussion.  Yet the rather medieval nature of the institution and the curriculum did give a number of benefits. The first was that we were free from much surveillance, simply writing an essay for a tutor once every two weeks, receiving elaborate feedback on it in a one-on-one tutorial, and then studying to pass those exams. As a community of students, then, we could engage in self-propelled learning outside the classroom, making connections of our own. I read Fanon, Gandhi, Germaine Greer, Thoreau, and Andrea Dworkin out of a personal project of self-education that only rarely intersected with what I did in class, as part of a process of working out who I was, what I believed, and how I should act in the world. And I made connections with the world through various kinds of activism and voluntary work. I don’t think I was unusual in these expectations of what university might provide.  Indeed, I’ve seen many of the undergraduate students I’ve worked with over the years making similar journeys of exploration.

The online classes I took recently, in contrast, were pedagogically thought out in a way my own undergraduate education never was. Each had a list of aims and objectives, used Blackboard or similar course management software, had a clear outline and a carefully specified series of assessments. They varied in terms of the quality of course design, and the nature of assessments. The best of the three, UBC’s CNPS 363, Introduction to Career Counselling and the second-best, University of Athabasca’s PSYC 323, Developmental Psychology, did have interesting and creative assessment components. CNPS 3263 had a concluding project which was a report on oneself and one’s career plans; PSYC 323 offered a number of choices, and I chose one that asked me to explore the original research that lay behind a newspaper report, and to discover what had been omitted and distorted. At worst, both the Athabasca course and Thompson Rivers University’s PSYC 2161, Abnormal Psychology, had large elements of assessment that involved memorizing and then regurgitating material in a single course textbook. While there were efforts to simulate an online community through discussion boards and, in UBC’s case, group sharing and commentary projects, there seemed to be little real sense of a community being formed around intellectual issues. When students did attempt to contact each other outside class, it was largely to exchange strategies for working on assessments or passing exams.: nothing wrong with this, but it’s hardly the core of intellectual life. And in all three courses there was no substantive written feedback apart from simply receiving grades. This isn’t a criticism of the instructors of the courses, all of whom were adjunct staff, no doubt overworked and underpaid, and all of whom relied promptly to emails and graded quickly.

There was another consequence of studying online without much sense of community: it was impossible to challenge the ideas presented in the course, to move beyond the staged debates that the courses presented to more far-reaching academic inquiry. In one assignment in PSYC2161 at Thompson Rivers, we were given an article describing the treatment of a woman with borderline personality disorder in which she was presented as moving from problematic behaviour in terms of “gender identity” towards stability. This involved a movement from an initial state in which she “dressed androgynously, kept very short hair, and never wore make up” to a post-treatment stasis of wearing dresses, make-up, and styling her hair in a “feminine way.” The assessment question asked students how they knew the woman “struggled with her gender identity” –when I wrote that I thought she didn’t, and that her discomfort in discussing gender might well have come from having to overcome the therapist’s own prejudices, I was marked down without further comment. I raise the issue in feedback at the end of the course, but didn’t hear anything more back.

My experience was thus that online learning environments, unless carefully thought out and properly resourced in terms of teaching staff, end up being hierarchical, and reinforcing passive learning. In an offline undergraduate classroom, at student woulds have argued with the text, and we’d have had real-time discussions in class. In the individualizing environment of the online classroom, the choice was between genuine learning and expedience: in the long run, I think, most students would choose expedience, especially given the greater cost of higher education, and the need to graduate and get out into the labour market. And what this introduces, it seems to me, is an increasingly differentiated higher education system, in which the intense discussions, feedback, and community that characterise liberal education become the experience of a privileged few, and routine memorization and individualization the experiences of the many.

Being on the other side of the fence, then, made me realize just how much  the boundaries had changed in undergraduate education. This post isn’t much more than an autoethnography: it can’t substantiate large claims about the nature of these changes. But it has made me think about how, under marketization, many of the gains we think we’ve made may actually also be losses.